Earthshine is mainly a story about a duo, but there are a few important secondary characters who make their mark on the whole narrative. One who has a particularly big impact is Nova. She arguably turns the duo of Sol and Nyx into a trio, but only in the back half of the story.

I would love to share more about her here but I run the risk of spoiling the whole first arc, and I’m learning that I should probably stop doing that. I do still want to name her ahead of time. I have been drawing a lot of art as I develop her character in preparation for her future debut, and I really want to post a bunch of it with some context to point back to haha. I think I just have a habit of introducing powerful and charismatic high femmes late in whatever narrative I’m writing. It’s like a sick joke I keep playing on myself.

Nova has gone through a few design changes before I settled on her current look. Honestly what has helped me flesh out Nova’s personality was sticking her in a sci-fi AU where she, Sol, and Nyx are travelling on a spaceship together doing deliveries and/or smuggling shit. 

The nuts and bolts of canon-Nova is that she loves swords, is a mage just like Nyx, and is a big fan of patricide. The rest will come as I start churning out this story.
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Hello again to returning readers and a regular hello to new visitors! This week I felt like sharing some more analog sketches I had scanned out of one of my sketchbooks. I've been using this HJ Canada permanent black sketchbook for a lot of my offline sketching and I really like it. I liked it so much I bought 3 more of them when I saw they were on sale.

These sketchbooks are pretty cheap (imo) costing between $12-15 CAN for the 5x8 inch ones and have 284 blank pages and a stitched spine that allows the book to lay flat. The paper is acid free with one side being more rough and the other smooth. They're fun to sketch in with ballpoint pen and can take watercolour, to an extent (I have suffered some bleed through though haha).

Drawing in this sketchbook has been freeing for me because it is so cheap and innocuous looking, with some nice mid-grade paper, but it can take a beating. My current sketchbook has seen the horrors of having half my water bottle leak on it, and then later on got caught in my bike spokes while they were in motion. I don't feel afraid to draw in this sketchbook and can freely scrawl wonky sketches in it.

These featured sketches were more of a test. Normally I would sketch right to ink using ballpoint or a black Pilot fine-liner. I enjoy sketching or drawing right to ink because it forces me not to overthink what I'm drawing. But recently I've been thinking about how I want to approach texture with my analog inking, so I've started doing a pencil under-sketch and then inking over top with the fine liner.

I still consider these sketches, because I kept my lines loose and rough in order to retain that good illusion of motion a sketch has. Making them too clean can take away from the energy in the under-sketch. From this I let myself have fun losing myself in the texture of the sketches, from Nyx's hair to Sol's wings.

I've been on a long path towards learning to enjoy analogue inking and having this intermediate stage which is still technically low stakes sketching, but also not, has been helping a bit. By doing this I have been discovering what kind of inking style I would like to adopt when using my dip pens, and honestly the style I like is one that has rough and loose line art with lots of texture. I want my inks to look like they are vibrating.

Hopefully once I do more with my dip pen I will scan and show those to y'all tuning in. Otherwise, thanks for stopping by, and have a nice weekend!

Hello for another batch of weekend sketches!

This weekend I wanted to feature yet another Closed Species ARPG I got into over the pandemic called PlushPets, which is run by Basketworm. I really love the aesthetic of this group as well as how low stakes it feels compared to some of the other ARPGs I'm a part of, which is saying something since those groups are also pretty chill.

The game play in PlushPets is simplistic and breezy with the freedom of character design being similarly so. You can pretty much design your character to look however you want with only small specific caveats.

After doing a few general art pieces to collect the in game currency, I built my first character who I named Starfall. I wish I had more to say beyond this but after creating my first character I fell off of playing the game. I would like to go back though. I definitely have been missing the easygoing nature of ARPGs.

I had even been thinking of building my own but... well I will talk on that more later.

Thanks for stopping by!